I know that this topic was discussed before, but maybe we can get some way to unlock empowered monoliths for alt characters? Personally I’m at the point where I don’t wanna play new characters just because vision of grinding all normal monoliths is just pushing me away. Honestly, for well-build character with some gear prepared in advance this is super boring and not fun at all.
Maybe it’s possible to add an item that you can trade to npc (the guy at monolith entrance perhaps?) and it will allow to unlock 1 empowered timeline in return?
Make it drop from empowered Orobyss only for example, with high corruption yielding higher chance to drop it.
I think that would be nice incentive to push corruption to high levels, but also very nice reward for doing so.
While I am not opposed to something like this for alts.
I am genuinely curious, how would you imagine progression for these characters?
The jump from Lvl 90 normal to Lvl 100 empowered already is a pretty big jump.
But when you finish the regular story, you will be ~ Lvl 55-58.
Would you directly jump into Lvl 100 Empowered?
While I don’t say this is not possible at all, its very unfeasible for the majority of players and builds.
It’s not about xp, if I wanna lvl up faster i jsut go to arena
The point is the normal monos are boring when u have full t15-t16 items prepared.
I leveled new sorc today, got to monos, started to use all the gear I prepared on my last char and found it super unfun to play.
That’s why I opt from some item allowing to skip that part. You play 1 toon for longer time, you can prepare gear, get keys and just skip boring normal monos.
I don’t speak about solo at all as I dont play this mode.
I’m writing about situation when you have all rare gear prepared in advance by main character. Similar to what you can do in PoE when at lvl 65-68 I usually jump straight to t14-t16 maps cause i had most of the gear prepared. Why not make something similar avaiable here for ppl who want play this way?
You get the keys from your stash, because you put them there with the character that unlocked Empowered Monoliths in the first place. When discussing progression unlocks for alts it’s completely reasonable to assume that they have access to gear and items that a new character on a new account wouldn’t have… that’s kind of the whole point.
I usually really like your interventions. What you say, what you are bringing to us, etc.
I understand that and why you want to delete your responses, but it’s super frustrating for someone who appreciates what you say here.
I respect their decision to delete their posts. This thread is specifically proposing an idea for unlocking Empowered Monoliths for alt characters that are overgeared for regular monoliths too quickly due to access to gear from higher leveled characters through the shared stash. Their criticism was entirely focused on how it wouldn’t work for solo characters that didn’t have access to a shared stash, but that’s not the problem that this proposal was trying to solve. It just wasn’t relevant to the topic. I could see myself doing the same if I realized that what I initially thought was a problem with a proposed idea was actually not applicable because it was from a different use-case.
100% agree.
It makes the threads hard to follow, and deprives us of some interesting opinions.
Your posts are usually really good. Please allow us to enjoy them a bit longer.
For clarification, this has absolutely nothing to do with the topic, I haven’t even had time to read it.
Queermathsgirl’s posts deletion is a systemic process in all threads, and that makes me sad because I like her posts.
I even private messaged Llama8 one day when I got worried she might have been banned.
That’s addressing one of my major complaints with normal and empowered monos. They are exactly the same in sense of gameplay. There are some additional items to be obtainable only on empowered, but the rest is just difficulty scaling. You get harder mobs but also bigger numbers on blessings. But apart from that it is exactly the same.
If empowered would be badass-ly difficult and only be doable with a big time investment and good gear, it would be ok, I think. For the first time when empowered monos were implemented they felt really hard on a fresh progressing character. This was before the overhaul and the 3 90s timelines got added.
But currently you don’t really feel any difficulty difference. Going into an empowered timeline for the first time doesn’t feel any different from the first time doing it in normal at the appropriate level.
Yes, it’s exactly the same. Same Echo types, same map assets, same enemies, same modifiers, same bosses with the same mechanics.
Imho the normal timelines currently are just filler content for level progression. Going from normal to empowered (where you can finally start to make the game more challanging) does feel like a relief and not like an exciting “wow, finally” moment.
The player has no control over difficulty in normal timelines. You out level the content on the fly. The content gets harder but at least only at a rate that you get stronger, if not even in a lower rate. The modifiers on the echoes can completely be ignored on your normal monos. They won’t challenge anybody. So the average difficulty stays the same for your complete normal playthrough. You can’t ever get in touch with content above your capabilities because you have to do timelines in a a strict order. You cannot skip a timeline to make it more challenging. The game dictates your difficulty level for you and you cannot break out.
It’s not about skipping the leveling process. It’s about making the leveling more exciting. Normal monos are only an artificial stretch of players playtime.
And why shouldn’t a twink leveling process have advantages over the first playthrough with skipping some mechanics and getting to the juicy endgame faster? It’s a common mechanic in other games.
I’m sorry, that triggered my pedant reflex (sorry). Just because the difficulty is capped in normal monos doesn’t mean you have no control over it. Not being able to take the difficulty high enough where your build/player skill feels challenged is very different to not being able to change the difficulty (which is what we have in the campaign).
You’re talking about the incremental impact that modifiers and corruption has on your timelines. Yes, it’s an exaggeration to call it “no control” when it’s more like pointless.
It doesn’t make sense to juice up a non empowered timeline to max 50 corruption. Because at that point you could’ve easily finished the timeline already and moved in to the next timeline (with higher enemy level = difficulty). So this is a non feature. It’s technically possible and at the same time just not a viable option.
90% of people go straight from first mono to empowered without any detours. This means going straight to every echos’ goal location and picking one branch on the echo web to progress and get stability the fastest way possible. Then next timeline and repeat.
This way people already skip most of the monolith mechanics for the sake of fast progress to empowered.
They don’t kill the Shade
They don’t stack corruption
They don’t care for modifiers
They don’t develop their echo web towards different directions because it means less stability to go different routes instead of just racing one branch
They don’t use echo rerolls/resets
Most of the mono features that make this system interesting are completely ignored on normal mode. Because it makes no sense to interact with the mono in the way you technically can.
